You’re No Entrepreneur, You Think? Think Again

“My son’s been accepted at both Stanford and MIT,” said the mom on the phone, “and I wanted to get your opinion on which one would be a better school.” “Gosh, I’d be hard-pressed to weigh in on that,” I said. “I haven’t met your son.”

“Well, which school do employers rate more highly?” she asked, as if this were the most obvious question in the world.

“Employers?” I asked politely, only barely stifling an apoplectic roar. “You know, if your son is bright enough to go to Stanford or MIT, I would hate to think that he’d lose any sleep over what employers would think of his alma mater. They’re both tremendous schools, and since you asked my advice, your kid is going to be a lot more successful following his own nose than getting a degree from a certain school in order to please anyone, particularly an unnamed and possibly irrelevant employer.”

I’m not sure the mom was totally tracking with me. Just at that moment she remembered that she had an imaginary cake in the oven and had to fly. Had we stayed on the phone longer, I would have told her that her son is going to be an entrepreneur, no matter what happens in his career after college. So will my kids be entrepreneurs. So will yours, if you have kids. The business might be called Top o’ the Muffin To You or Jack’s Career, but the game is essentially the same.

In fact, the danger for working people in this 21st century is to forget that we’re all entrepreneurs, that the job-security ground under our feet is not solid, and that the best skills we can cultivate now are the ones associated with reading the landscape, jumping on opportunities, looking at situations from all perspectives and learning (and then always knowing) our worth in the talent marketplace. That means knowing our value to people and organizations who have the kind of pain we solve.

A young woman wrote to me. “They’re offering me $48K,” she said. “Congratulations!” I wrote back. “Are you excited?” “Is that a fair salary for this kind of job?” she asked. The poor thing had no idea. We have to know. We can’t be at the mercy of employers any more than a plumber would launch a business with no idea what plumbers charge for their work. Business isn’t different from the rest of life. Don’t believe anyone who tells you it is. It’s just problem-solving and putting one foot in front of the other. The closer we can be to the ground in any job – that is, the closer to the way things work in reality and how our business and our talents connect to that framework – the better.

I don’t know how much of that ground-level problem-solving, in context, they teach in school. I wish there were more of that learning, and less of the rules and theories that people made up years ago and are now taught without comment, as gospel, out of context, and out of time.

It hit me many years ago, when I was waitressing and singing opera as a nineteen-year-old in Chicago, that opera singers like me had a peculiar problem. There isn’t an opera company on every street corner. Opera singers fight over the few plum roles that are available for way too many singers (sopranos like me in particular) in any city, even big ones like Chicago. So what do singers do? They learn to start stuff. They learn to slip through keyholes to make musical things rise up out of nothing except a couple of cups of coffee and a few willing participants.

Opera singers have a problem baked into their profession, so they learn to improvise and put things together and become mini-impresarios. The challenge of the profession makes us stronger. Which do you want your kid to be – ferried straight from college into a ‘safe’ job, without muscles, or out on the street building muscles he’ll use for the rest of his life?

Opera singers learn how to go on auditions and not be attached to the outcome. Do you know who else does that? Every consultant, and every entrepreneur. It’s one of the muscles they grow in their work, close to the ground. Guess who else had those muscles? Our forefathers and foremothers had them. They knew how to look at the landscape around them and figure out how to deal, no matter what got thrown at them. They had it way worse than most of us do now. Back then, ‘entrepreneur’ wasn’t even a thing. You just get up in the morning and do whatever you need to do.

Managing your career like it’s your business (because it is) is not only prudent, it’s mojo-building, too. Forty-eight-year-old people should not be calling people like me on the phone to say “I think my boss is put out with me, but I’m not really sure, but I think he is.” Like we’re in middle school, and I’m not judging – I’m just sad for people who can’t be adults in the workplace, certainly an adult ecosystem. The power relationship throws everything out of whack. The fish stop noticing the color of the water they’re swimming in. Fear goes up. Mojo level goes down.

When you run your job like an entrepreneur, you’re always aware of the situation around you and the throughline between your own desk and role and the organization’s fortunes. I don’t like these books that try to teach people how to be indispensable at work. What an awful fate – to tie your own value and your security to someone else’s inability to replace you! It sounds depressing. We can do better. We can keep one eye trained on the horizon, make our own path whether there are W-2s or 1099s in the picture, and stay in ourselves and our power.

We can bring ourselves to work, and in fact we have to. We can view the new-millennium talent ecosystem a/k/a The End of Employment with horror, or embrace it as a sandbox full of lessons the universe wants us to learn anyway.